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Excuse me, are you fucking retarded? How are Unity, KDE, Gnome3, XFCE, IceWM, Awesome, LXDE duplicating anything? They are completely different projects with complete different goals and views. And user-friendly are usable out of the box, developer friendly are expecting developer to customize them to their needs by reading documentation. Just shutup!

Another proof that you are fucking retarded.
There is difference between truck and train, no? Fucking yes. Different transport ways call for different paradigms.
On modern hardware, the network transparent Xorg is inefficient, because no one has supermachine with 1000 thin graphical terminals at home anymore. These "features" are not used, but are required for graphical throughput, resulting in excessive complexity, loss of performance and degraded coding/debugging transparency.
Xorg is in no freaking way is going to be abadoned or broken.
The road map is either to finish Wayland and then implement Wayland over network or rewrite Xorg from scratch specifically to match needs of datacenters with multiple thin clients to "as needed" degree.

Ubuntu decided to write own display server. The only two reasons why Ubuntu got under crossfire is NOT because they duplicate anything. It is THEIR money and THEIR decision.
They got criticized only because they have listed many Wayland shortcommings that are false statements because they actually do not know Wayland. That was cleared by them.
Which resulted in another criticism vector, they rewrite simply because they want full control over it even though they have not been hindered to change and upstream anything they change, which is always seen as stupid thing to do.
Are we clear now?

If you did start in 1997, then you would not bullshit me with such claims! In 2003 Linux was enough powerfull with Nvidia graphics card and HP all-in-ones to do absolutely everything.
That was the year of Linux desktop for me, because I booted into it and never booted back into windows since then. Never.

I know a frigging 80 year old salesman, COMPLETE NOOB when it comes to computers, who works in technical area who uses Linux for EVERYTHING. Is he nerd?

Oh shut up - what is "MVP"?

Fine, lets unroll the quote for the blind:

I havent and going from Ubuntu to Fedora to whatever will work FINE.
I also were not talking about "something completely different". So suggestion - how about you shut up?

Are you fucking retarded?! Binary packages work FINE across different versions of same or whatever distribution, because each distribution has own binary repository that no one ever cares about because its automatic.
No, I haven't heard of Linux dependency hell, but I know about DLL hell and newer version WinSUCKS (WinSxS) which grows beyond 100GiB very rapidly due to each application being installed with own dynamic libraries in seperate containers.
Also, you once more point out you should shut the fuck up because amount of updates one gets depends solely on software choice and distribution policy - whether its rapidly updating or not; whether its bleeding edge or stable.
If you join microshaft developer channel, you winblows beta is updated no less frequent as for example, debian sid. But one difference again - one can PIN the packages and prevent any updates without breaking anything.

How fucking much have both MacOS and windows reinvented the wheel? What about microsoft bob?

Oh fuck no, not because it works great - but because they have no choice but get used to it. And you are NOT forced, if you want stable software, use STABLE DISTRIBUTION. They have XFCE 4.6 right now in Debian Stable, very old, but completely stable.

Nope - a turd is matter that constantly spreads decaying odor regardless of environiment for no apparent reason except its own nature, it matches you perfectly.
I am a turd cleaner and you are wiped once again.

I agree with most of what you said and I was just going to bash his dependency hell statement earlier. Dependency hell isn't what we have today, yes there are loads of dependencies but same for Windows apps.... now what dependency hell refers to (to those of us who suffered I still have nightmares about it) is wayyy back in the 90's you would want to set up an Apache server or something, so you make the server... well errors spit out depends on yadda yadda, download the tarball for that make and guess what... more dependencies, it took many hours of compiling just to get one God damn thing working it was insane. I remember RPM's being really rare but interesting and I couldn't wait for them to take over the Linux world, no more compiling for hours!!! Well little did I know .deb would take over and I would be back to compiling... not so painful these days I guess.

Linux is a bunch of different distro's all running the linux kernel and a smorgasbord of pretty much the same de's, and gnu software. Each has been more or less tweaked in small, cosmetic ways. The main differentiator among all these distros is package management. Does that mean the platform is hopelessly "fragmented"? Far from it. The flexibility of this platform, unlike the commercial offerings (meaning Apple and Windows) is... flexibility to take the source code, and do whatever you want with it. Even without needing to monkey around with code, you can customize a given distro in ways unimaginable to mac and windows users. These are strengths and advantages, not a drawback.

One may fairly say that Linux has been unable to compete in the marketplace of commercial desktop operating systems because, well, it isn't one. It isn't in your face flogging its brand on mainstream media 24/7, with shelf space and retail outlets in every mall, and a price point to match. Advertising, distribution, point-of-sale packaging, profits, and bevies of ip lawyers aren't exactly cheap baggage, and it's all factored into the retail prices. Linux is just out there, freely available (literally) to anyone who can discover it, and I'm very glad to use it.

Miguel de Icaza has a rockstar complex that's proven a very bad fit in the open source community. It's always, all about him. Here's hoping he finds whatever he's looking for in Apple's closed garden, and will henceforth leave the linux community alone. We don't need no steenking rockstars, eh?

Linux is a bunch of different distro's all running the linux kernel and a smorgasbord of pretty much the same de's, and gnu software. Each has been more or less tweaked in small, cosmetic ways. The main differentiator among all these distros is package management. Does that mean the platform is hopelessly "fragmented"? Far from it. The flexibility of this platform, unlike the commercial offerings (meaning Apple and Windows) is... flexibility to take the source code, and do whatever you want with it. Even without needing to monkey around with code, you can customize a given distro in ways unimaginable to mac and windows users. These are strengths and advantages, not a drawback.

One may fairly say that Linux has been unable to compete in the marketplace of commercial desktop operating systems because, well, it isn't one. It isn't in your face flogging its brand on mainstream media 24/7, with shelf space and retail outlets in every mall, and a price point to match. Advertising, distribution, point-of-sale packaging, profits, and bevies of ip lawyers aren't exactly cheap baggage, and it's all factored into the retail prices. Linux is just out there, freely available (literally) to anyone who can discover it, and I'm very glad to use it.

Miguel de Icaza has a rockstar complex that's proven a very bad fit in the open source community. It's always, all about him. Here's hoping he finds whatever he's looking for in Apple's closed garden, and will henceforth leave the linux community alone. We don't need no steenking rockstars, eh?

I really disliked the idea of mono, the way I disliked the idea of Wine. It made an excuse to not use Linux native tools or compilers. I thank him for his work and curse him as well. Wine and mono are both double edged swords and I understand the need if not loathe the result. Yeah I know, I use Wine when I must for games I "must" play... Wow I suck.

I am not so sure the linux desktop is particularly fragmented either. It certainly provides a lot of choice, and Ubuntu does seem to fragment whatever it can these days. Still, xorg and pulseaudio is used by everybody today. GTK and Qt are basically the only GUI frameworks in use (though firefox and libreoffice use their own for historic reasons). Everybody seems to converge to systemd and wayland (with Ubuntu as a possible exception, although I don't think Mark is mad enough to try to do it all alone). The GNU stack with GCC is still king. Graphics drivers are finally giving us hope for a competitive open stack within two years. Both KDE, Gnome and Unity have embraced modern design principles and mature nicely. Seems all three of them are soon up to speed with both Windows and OSX. Some serious shortcomings on the application stack is being addressed these days. Yep, there are still issues, rough edges to iron out. Let us all try to help out with the last hundred paper cuts. I see 2013 as a very promising year for the linux desktop, I expect a healthy growth, no revolution, but healthy growth. 2014 and 2015 look very interesting given that the current progress continues though.

partner up with that dirty mexican whore icaza and go fucking suck off jobs corpse.

you people disgust me.

linux is by far the most advanced and adaptable operating system I have used. It pains me to have to use windows just because of the lack of programs in linux

I am fully aware that if developers bothered optimizing their programs for linux, the same they do for windows, linux would be light years ahead of win.

The lack of software is the deal breaker and what is keeping linux down you dumb fucks. That and subpar support from vendors like intel etc

You could have the most amazing desktop environment ever that would suck your dick and pat your back at the same time and it wouldn't mean shit since there's no decent video/sound editing software, image manipulation etc etc etc...

and I suppose the frantic pace of development that makes linux so good is also a killer when it comes to third party programs.

I have done keeping ~ between Fedora and openSUSE and I can say that Fedora->openSUSE and openSUSE->Fedora works just fine, as well as maintaining ~ while going up in versions. Infact either of those -> Slackware works fine too although the transition back isn't so clean as you have to Chown everything when you want to use it with another Distro.

But of course!
When transitioning, I also tend to delete irrelevant config I never use.
For example, I am moving the Xu 12.04 32bit to U 13.04 64bit system, so I keep only mozilla and clawsmail directories, since there is no other config worthy to keep. This is the salesman machine I am talking about and he is extremely happy with upgrade. It takes me 10 minutes and the system pulls down what it should automatically.

Originally Posted by nightmarex

I agree with most of what you said and I was just going to bash his dependency hell statement earlier. Dependency hell isn't what we have today, yes there are loads of dependencies but same for Windows apps.... now what dependency hell refers to (to those of us who suffered I still have nightmares about it) is wayyy back in the 90's you would want to set up an Apache server or something, so you make the server... well errors spit out depends on yadda yadda, download the tarball for that make and guess what... more dependencies, it took many hours of compiling just to get one God damn thing working it was insane. I remember RPM's being really rare but interesting and I couldn't wait for them to take over the Linux world, no more compiling for hours!!! Well little did I know .deb would take over and I would be back to compiling... not so painful these days I guess.

Sure, I heard there was dependency resolver problems in the past with RPM, which were fixed. Right now, there is so many package management tools, each having own approach from none to full automatic GUI click-and-forget, that there is a lot to choose from! I mean, if one wants to fully control all dependencies - LFS or Slackware (without any tools), if not - huge pick of riped projects.

Originally Posted by arokh

It's becoming clear to me I'm discussing with a child. Come back once you've grown up, moved out from your nerdcave and had some real world experience with computers will you?

The Linux desktop have always been and still is a trainwreck. Even the devs are realizing it and they are either abandoning ship or trying to fix things by creating more fragmentation as usual. Too bad UnitedLinux failed, they were on the right path until SCO went insane.

Oh duck! The grow-up aka no-life aka your-mom argument! The sign of the 10 year old. Don`t tell me I`ve been arguing with a child! In that case, please excuse me for my excessive wordlist! I am sure you can install VirtualBox in your windows - there is a plenty of instructional videos at youtube, and then please start expirementing with Linux on practice! You will sure learn a lot! If not, please refrain from answering in this thread again, till you do, because no one sure wants to harm you, I will also refrain from answering you, since I have hurt your sensitive soul too much already GL!

PS. Regarding UnitedLinux, since you mentioned it - it was pure attempt to standartise the userspace, so that proprietary applications can be deployed. That was its single and only goal. UnitedLinux had nothing to do with "unification" or "free software", because they already communicate very well without it.

It's Been Interesting Reading

The word "fragmentation" shouldn't be used unless you are going to define what fragmentation is. The classic definition for "fragmentation" is that different versions of the system are developed that are binary incompatible on the same type of hardware. According to this definition, Linux is not fragmented at all. Incidentally, package manager incompatibility is not the same thing as binary incompatibility. To take a case in point, you can download the same binary tarball for Firefox from the Mozilla site and run it on whatever distribution you wish as long as all of its dependencies are met (you may have some issues with the location of the Flash plugin or things like that).

Of course, when Miguel de Icaza uses the word "fragmentation" he is apparently talking about something different, but I can't tell for certain exactly what.

Incidentally, as I have always heard it, "dependency hell" primarily refers to the phenomenon of two different binary programs requiring different conflicting versions of the same library. In other words, it's pretty much exactly the same thing as "dll hell" in Windows, and methods for dealing with it can even be similar. I have seen both of these types of "library hell" in my time on computers, but not often in either case (both used to be more common than now).

People seem to imagine, or to want to convince others, that binary program installation is somehow entirely different on Windows or Mac than it is on Linux. In reality they are much, much more similar than they are different.

For the most part the difference is a difference between the software being open source and freely available, and closed source and paid for. In Linux, binaries for open source programs don't include all the dependencies because they are probably already available or easily installed from the distribution repositories. In Windows, only standard Windows dlls are expected to be in place, and libraries needed by a new closed source binary are included with it, and often installed in its directory to avoid conflicts (dll hell).

What people don't seem to realize is that this difference has nothing to do with Windows or Linux. If you install a Gtk program in Windows and you don't install Gtk, then you'll find the program doesn't function. The pieces for these open source programs tend not to be spread out too much for Windows because none of them are generally expected to be there already. In Linux, if you install a completely proprietary, closed source program, you will find that it often includes all its own dependencies, just like it would in Windows.

Also, there is package management. Microsoft thought that package management as found in Linux distributions was such a good idea that they created a package manager for Windows (although it seems quite inferior to the major Linux package managers with all the stuck software and bugs). Before that, all Windows software was installed using installation scripts, like those from Wyse or Installshield. Guess what; installation on Linux can also be done with installation scripts, and a number of proprietary applications use them (including a number of games). The only real difference here is that now, there is just one package manager for Windows (even though it stinks), and a fair amount of installation scripts still, while there are several different package managers for Linux, and installation scripts are not used as often.

One thing I will say for Windows installation management is that the system does a fairly good job of tracking scripted installations and their uninstallation scipts and making the uninstallation option appear transparently in the same interface as actual MSI packages.

People who are calling for unification of effort in Linux are apparently out of touch with reality. Open source software was created to allow users and developers (it's freedom for both, by the way, and perhaps particularly the freedom for users to become developers) the freedom to do what they wanted with the software and get what they needed out of it. The current success of Linux is based on this possibility. It would never have gotten anywhere near where it is without it, so it's really rather ridiculous to curse the thing that made Linux possible as what's holding it back. The duplication of effort, the freedom to start yet another text editor project (and believe me, there are a lot of them) is what made Linux possible and successful. You can't have it both ways.

Apparently, there are those who think that the Windows interface (or at least those prior to 8) and the Mac interface are superior to what's available for Linux. I don't find that to be the case. Of course if I did, then there are still choices in Linux that do a fairly good job mimicking existing Windows or Mac interfaces, so I wouldn't be completely out of luck on Linux. For me, though, the interfaces I do use for Linux are infinitely superior to what's available for Windows (I can't fairly judge Mac, because I haven't really used a Mac since OS 9 or earlier). Part of the reason for this is because the features that I want are available. Part of it is that I can tailor the interface to suit the hardware. I can use Fluxbox or Openbox on old machines and have those machines perform reasonably well. I can put Xfce on newer hardware if I want (and it doesn't have to be all that new). I also have the option of KDE or GNOME if I want it, though I have never found these desktops particularly desirable (though some certainly have). Every attempt I've seen to duplicate the multiple workspace environment I use in Linux for Windows ends up being a pale shadow of the real thing, generally more annoying than helpful.